Hannah Arendt - The Human Condition (1958)

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It is, in fact, far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.

Hannah Arendt
To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin... to set something into motion.

Hannah Arendt
It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the ferrets of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.

Hannah Arendt
The alternative to forgiveness, but by no means its opposite, is punishment, and both have in common that they attempt to put an end to something that without interference could go on endlessly. It is therefore quite significant, a structural element in the realm of human affairs, that men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and that they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable.

Hannah Arendt
The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility - of being unable to undo what one has done - is the faculty of forgiving.

Hannah Arendt
This future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.

Hannah Arendt
Of all human activities, only labor, and neither action nor work, is unending, progressing automatically in accordance with life itself and outside the range of willful decisions or humanly meaningful purposes.

Hannah Arendt
The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the 'easy life of the gods' would be a lifeless life.

Hannah Arendt
Poets... are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.

Hannah Arendt
Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.

Hannah Arendt
Of all things of thought, poetry is the closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art.

Hannah Arendt
Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover.

Hannah Arendt
Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.

Hannah Arendt
The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.

Hannah Arendt
I've begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world... Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories Amor Mundi.

Hannah Arendt
Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.

Hannah Arendt
Whenever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.

Hannah Arendt
Freedom from labor itself is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical developments had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize.

Hannah Arendt
Every activity performed in public can attain an excellence never matched in privacy; for excellence, by definition, the presence of others is always required.

Hannah Arendt
Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.

Hannah Arendt
In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which, because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action.

Hannah Arendt
What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing

Hannah Arendt
Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.

Hannah Arendt
While violence can destroy power, it can never become a substitute for it.

Hannah Arendt
Without forgiveness, we would never be released from the consequences of what we have done or what has been done to us, and our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover.

Hannah Arendt